—3— Those who sheltered under her wing still call her Miss Mirrielees, with the same respectful emphasis on “Miss” that an Englishman might apply to “Sir” when addressing a brigadier knighted for heroic service to his country. Like Johnny Appleseed, Doris Irene Mirrielees was an eccentric original—an itinerant bearer of hope whose passion and devotion deeply touched every child and parent she encountered. Her unconventional ideas and techniques affected my life profoundly. When she answered Mother’s letter of inquiry that day in 1944, Miss Mirrielees had been a private live-in tutor for perhaps half a dozen families with deaf children. She had developed and refined what was then and in some ways still is a revolutionary philosophy. Mother and Dad responded to it immediately, for it addressed their concerns about me as did no other method they had yet encountered. Miss Mirrielees believed that the educational establishment had failed the deaf. Inefficient, uncaring teaching methods had produced large numbers of semiliterate adults fit only for menial tasks. The underlying cause, she felt, was that most educators, especially those in the ubiquitous residential schools for the deaf, equated deafness with retardation. Of their charges they expected little and received less. Residential schools, therefore, seemed to Miss Mirrielees nothing more than holding tanks for the hopeless. In her view they taught deaf youngsters, not the difficult arts of coping with a hearing world on its own terms, but only the primitive skills necessary for a sheltered, low-income existence. Miss Mirrielees was passionately certain that all deaf children could enjoy lives as full and productive as those of their hearing peers, if only they could acquire the gift of language—the whole gift, not a small part of it—as soon as possible. To do so, she argued, very young deaf children, Kisor_Pig text.indd 15 5/4/10 1:42:48 PM like their hearing brothers and sisters, needed the security and love of life at home. Only in such a “normal” environment, she believed, could a deaf child’s intellect blossom under her theories of teaching. An old idea was the kernel of her new method. In a memoir privately published in 1952, Miss Mirrielees told how, as an undergraduate at Chicago Normal School at the turn of the century, she had learned a technique called “Plan Work.” In it, older, more advanced deaf pupils used a common experience as a base for learning new language. From the simple idea of a milkman arriving at a house with bottles of milk, for instance, the pupils would learn—as the teacher acted out the roles in a heavy pantomime— how milk helped them to grow, how refrigerators cooled the milk, and so on. New ideas about milk would be added to their general knowledge. To show how things are related was the aim of this method; it taught how language worked to express abstractions. AtthattimemostschoolsforthedeaftaughtonlyrudimentaryEnglish— simple nouns and verbs of the “Apple is food. I eat apple” variety. A deaf child did well to learn fifty-two single words—one a week—by the end of his first year. This, Miss Mirrielees argued, was absurd. Teaching single words, or two words at a time, was teaching deaf children not language but simple actions and responses, just as a dog learns to fetch a thrown stick and earn a pat on the head. Rather, deaf children ought to learn that words stood for abstractions as well as objects and actions. They should learn not only that a thing is called a “rose,” she wrote, but also that it “is a flower, that it smells sweet, that it is beautiful in color and form, that it grows from a tiny bud, helped by the sunshine and rain, that it should be treasured and cultivated because it brings happiness and pleasure to everyone who sees it.” Miss Mirrielees tirelessly argued that deaf children could catch up to, and keep up with, their hearing peers in language development—if they were given the right means. But how? The process of language learning begins before birth; the normal fetus hears and responds to sounds from outside. Conversely, it’s well past birth when most parents of deaf babies learn the devastating truth, and by then their children are not just one but several steps behind their peers, who have been exposed to the stimuli of sound ever since and perhaps before emerging into the world. The catching-up process should begin immediately, Miss...